History
In this timeline, the massive rift in the space-time continuum known as the Fault was never stabilized. As a result, it continued to expand and consume all time and space in that universe.
As the universe shrank around them, the Badoon clung on like cockroaches. At some point, they acquired the last Cosmic Cube and used it to enslave the last of the Celestials. The Badoon then engineered those Celestials into what they called the Celestial Engine, a super-cage around a power source formed from Earth's dying Sun. They used the Celestial Engine to generate a macro force field that held the Fault back. The Badoon were extremely possessive about this little bubble of reality that their tech had created and exterminated any other survivors that they found within it. However, the power of the Celestial Engine was not great enough to maintain the bubble universe at its original size and it slowly shrank.
At some point, Earth was destroyed and reduced to rubble, and the human race was almost entirely wiped out. The only survivors were the five Guardians of the Galaxy who used Avengers Mansion, which had survived intact on one of the floating pieces of rubble, as their hidden base.
By the year 3009 A.D., after the bubble of unconsumed reality had shrunken to the size of the Solar System, Starhawk began using Doctor Doom's Time Machine to travel back into the past (Earth-616) to learn what had caused the Fault. After several visits, she learned that it was the detonation of the Terrigen Bomb that was responsible. Knowing that she, as a temporal complication that was just another symptom of the Fault, would be unable to repair the damage cleanly, Starhawk brought Cosmo and four members of the Guardians of the Galaxy team from that past back with her to her future to show them what was going to happen.
Once the five visitors from Earth-616 understood the threat posed by the Terrigen Bomb, they agreed to return to their own time and stop it from being detonated. However, the Badoon, who had detected the energy flare caused by the latest usage of the time machine, attacked the mansion, destroying the time machine before it could be used. Starhawk sacrificed herself to buy the others enough time to escape in the starship Captain America, and the nine surviving Guardians realized that their only remaining option was to send a message back in time. Knowing that all Celestials were linked by quantum telepathy that connected them across time and space, the Guardians flew the Captain America at the Celestial Engine, attracting the attention of Badoon warships. The Captain America was destroyed but not before the Guardians were able to transmat themselves into one of the Celestials. Once there, eight of them held off the Badoon warriors as they began teleporting in, giving Cosmo the opportunity to reach the Celestial's brain and make telepathic contact with its mind. Cosmo then relayed to the Celestial the message from Starlord (Peter Quill) that they wanted it to transmit to Knowhere, the severed head of a Celestial which served as the base of operations of the past Guardians team in Earth-616.
After having been told that the message had been sent, the Guardians, now that there was nothing left to save in their future, prepared to finally defeat the Badoon. Major Victory unleashed a huge psychokinetic blast that blew the Celestial out of alignment with the eight other Celestials surrounding it. Once that lattice was disrupted, the entire Celestial Engine began to fall apart. As the Celestials and the Guardians began to fall into the Sun, the force field failed and the Fault rushed in to consume the last fragments of reality.[1]
Seconds after that message was sent, reality imploded and the timeline was vaporized. However, the five visitors from Earth-616, being anomalies in that future, survived by being displaced sideways in time, appearing on Earth-91118.[2]Residents
Notes
- This universe's number is a reference to Earth-691, the timeline of the original Guardians of the Galaxy team.
- In the past, Adam Warlock was able to stabilize the Fault and prevent it from expanding. It was not made clear if this action merely diverged Earth-616 from this timeline or if it retroactively prevented Earth-669116 from ever having existed.
- The fate of this timeline was revealed on the recap page of Guardians of the Galaxy (Vol. 2) #18.
- Starhawk stated that her time, the so-called Future Tense, had been changing from one nightmarish possibility to another because time itself was in flux due to what she called "the error" that happened in the time of the Guardians from the past. She also stated that, whenever her reality shifted into another iteration, she had been using Doom's time machine to travel into the past to try to stop the Future Tense from happening. Although she seemed to believe that the Fault was the error, Guardians of the Galaxy (Vol. 2) #25 would later reveal that the true error that caused the Timeflux War was the unexpected return of Thanos from death.
- Starhawk's statement was a bit problematic because her own words indicated that the universe being consumed by the Fault was just the latest in a series of nightmarish iterations of the Future Tense. That would imply that the Fault must have also been responsible for those other, unseen nightmarish futures. One would think that the implicit unlikelihood of that idea would have been enough to make her realize that the Fault was not the true error in the past after all.
- This timeline is basically a just a way to get a version of the original Guardians of the Galaxy team involved in the whole Fault storyline. Unfortunately, like some What If...? scenarios, it is incredibly implausible. Since the Fault had almost completely consumed the entire universe in the millennium since it was ripped open in 2009 A.D., its existence in any timeline would have massively disrupted the series of events that would have had to have happened in order for there to have been a team of Guardians of the Galaxy in the early 31st century that so closely resembled the originals. For one thing, Charlie-27 and Martinex should not have existed as they did unless the exact same sequence of events that led to the creation of their Jovian and Plutonian races had occurred in this timeline despite the presence of the Fault. Given that the Milky Way galaxy and Earth were very close, in astronomical terms, to where the Fault had opened, they should have been consumed very early in its expansion, well before the century in which the Jovian and Plutonian races were created.
See Also
- 2 appearance(s) of Earth-669116
- 25 image(s) of Earth-669116
- 21 characters that originate from Earth-669116
- 1 teams that originate from Earth-669116
- 1 organizations that originate from Earth-669116
- 1 locations that originate from Earth-669116
- 1 items that originate from Earth-669116
- 1 races that originate from Earth-669116